


A Blissful Blank Canvas Mind

by drinkbloodlikewine, whiskeyandspite



Category: Penny Dreadful (TV)
Genre: Addiction, First Kiss, Gaslighting, Gentleness, M/M, Manipulation, Nostalgia, TPE, this one is rather dark
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-22
Packaged: 2018-07-13 01:45:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7133528
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drinkbloodlikewine/pseuds/drinkbloodlikewine, https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandspite/pseuds/whiskeyandspite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“Perhaps it is not Lily that needs your serum,” he murmurs. “Perhaps it’s me that requires it more. She’s driven me to madness, Henry. I may not jibber and screech with it, to your ears, but inside me is a cacophony akin to your hospital. I cannot sleep because of her. I cannot eat because of her. I cannot live because of -”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“The morphine,” Henry adds, not unkindly, “just as much.”</i>
</p>
<p>
  <i>“So tell me then, Doctor Jekyll, in all your expertise, what am I to do?”</i>
</p>
<p>Doctors heal hearts, after all, don't they?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kinneykid3](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kinneykid3/gifts).



> Written for a wonderful friend who has a tendency to give us the simplest ideas that run freaking rampant XD Hope you enjoy it love!
> 
> Title taken from IAMX's Land of Broken Promises.

“You’ve not slept,” Henry points out, cutlery clicking gently against the worn china as he takes up a napkin to dab against his lips. “And your hands are shaking.”

He had gone, the night before, to the little apartment that Victor had called him to not two weeks before. There, he had knocked and waited, hearing beyond the door a scuffle of displeasure and breathing, and no answer. He had come late, later than Victor should have been up, even for work. He had gone away unseen.

Henry watches the doctor before him now, eyes down to his plate and food mostly untouched, and considers. “I thought we had agreed that the morphine would no longer be necessary.”

The shadows gathered beneath Victor’s eyes are familiar enough, curious hallmarks of his poor self-maintenance that unlike other shadows seem to darken in the light. But the redness that rims his lids is newly acquired, paired no doubt to the vessels that show along the whites of his eyes. Victor Frankenstein, Henry knows, has been crying.

And yet he smiles all the same, a wan and indulgent thing that coils away as if ashamed of itself as he responds, “Perhaps you should tell that to the morphine.”

“An inanimate object does no more than hold control,” Jekyll points out. “It is a sentient being that can make a choice regarding how strong that hold is over them.”

Victor’s lip trembles in a snarl before he suppresses the motion and takes up his fork instead. His shoulders straighten, his chin lifts - though his eyes do not - and he becomes, for all intents and purposes, entirely unreachable. To anyone but Henry, who has reached him through this mask before.

“What has caused you such grief?” He asks.

Frankenstein withholds his words for as long as it takes him to rearrange the food on his plate, pushing the meat aside and the peas in to fill its place. Moving the bread alongside the potatoes, and the meat from one side to the other. Until his hand is trembling with such force that the tines of his fork titter against the plate, and then he sets it down, firmly.

“I went to her,” he says. “After your display yesterday at Bedlam, I went to her.”

“Why,” Jekyll asks.

“Hope,” laughs Victor, a mirthless, raw sound scraping as his silverware did against the china. “I hoped that she would speak with me and be reasonable, that I would not have to bring her to that place. I hoped that - that perhaps I would see her again and feel nothing towards her, and all of this could see an end.”

“And?”

“She kissed me, and pushed me away.”

Henry hums but says nothing. He lets his gaze, slow and hooded and deliberately displeased speak for him. How often has he rescued his friend from his ridiculous poetic fantasies? How many times has he drawn him away from his silly books to remind him of their purpose in this world?

He thinks of the proud boy he had known at school, he thinks of his lack of care the first time he had chosen to sit with Henry Jekyll, half-caste and outcast for their dinner. This is no longer that boy. This is a shell of him, wallowing and pathetic, and it pains Henry and much as it angers him that a woman - one not even alive, one not ever meant to be Victor’s at all - has brought him to this.

“You gave her good sense, when you made her,” he murmurs.

Victor blinks wide in the instant before he leans back, and a crease shadows heavy on his brow. “I beg your pardon.”

“It is a failure of evolution for a creature to seek its own destruction, and to desire that which harms it. It is a weakness, endemic, that will see itself inherently eradicated. Even animals know not to partake of plants that would poison them.”

“I have done nothing but love her,” Victor hisses.

“And yet she senses in you that you would be harmful to her,” Henry offers. “How could you not, when you so readily do harm to yourself?”

Victor pushes his plate forward, not a pea consumed, and folds his hands before himself. The floorboards’ ache betrays the anxious jostling of his leg, and his eyes narrow at the man - his friend, despite whatever - who sits before him so cool and smug that butter would not melt in his mouth. “What would you have me do then, Henry? If I am so given to contagious destruction, perhaps I should end myself here and now. Rid the world of all the woes I’ve caused to it.”

“In so doing you would cause irreparable harm, worse than any you claim to have caused already,” Henry counters, his lips tilting just enough to suggest a smile, though his smooth features remain mostly expressionless. “Best to stay alive, I think, and change the world.”

“I can think of none who would notice my absence,” Victor spits.

“I can think of one,” Henry replies, bringing his glass to his lips and taking a sip, tongue quick to catch a stray drop as he sets the glass away. “Losing someone of your calibre would be as tragic a loss as the library of Alexandria, I would not recommend it.”

Frankenstein ducks his head at this, bony shoulders shifting in discomfort beneath his braces as the weight of Henry’s admiration once more burdens him. He does not want to hear it, but it is the first time today that his blood has felt warm. He does not want him here, but being left alone again without him would drive him to the needle faster than his own needs naturally will. The jostling of his leg carries up through his arms, set to the table, and so he takes them back, folding them across his stomach instead.

“Perhaps it is not Lily that needs your serum,” he murmurs. “Perhaps it’s me that requires it more. She’s driven me to madness, Henry. I may not jibber and screech with it, to your ears, but inside me is a cacophony akin to your hospital. I cannot sleep because of her. I cannot eat because of her. I cannot live because of -”

“The morphine,” Henry adds, not unkindly, “just as much.”

“So tell me then, Doctor Jekyll, in all your expertise, what am I to do?”

Henry watches his friend, hanging as though by strings pulled too tight, too close to snapping from the tension of the form beneath them. He is prone to hyperbole and overreaction, he is prone to bouts of anger and deadly anguish.

Genius suffers, there is no other way for it to grow.

“Allow yourself to stop seeking for your own destruction. Allow yourself to flourish from seeking ambrosia, not poison.” He pushes his own plate aside to clasp his fingers together and lean nearer. “Victor, look at me.” When he does, Jekyll takes his time to look back. “There is no weakness in seeking for a crutch that will not kill you. Your mind and heart ache for being fed on poor substitutes for reason and logic. One needs more than poetic words to ease the soul, Victor, one needs action.”

He hooks his ankles together and presses one toe against the wooden floorboards, levering himself closer still to Victor who cannot seem to move away, hypnotized. “Do not take such pride in your pain, when it stifles you. Take pride in the memory of it, getting you this far.”

“Forgive me,” Victor interjects, his voice still near to a whisper but no longer a hiss. “But having spent months - a lifetime, more like - fed on the likes of Tennyson and Keats, and now fallen into the very source of Coleridge’s inspiration, you give me poetry that does not stir what embers yet remain of my soul, but douses its flame entirely. You tell me to take pride, but in what? That I have suffered? That I suffer still?”

“That you will survive it and move past,” Henry answers. “That we both will, together.”

“Then do not feed me words, Henry, please,” begs Frankenstein. “Tell me what more action I can take than that which I already have. Tell me -” His voice falters, and when Henry reaches to take his hand, Victor squeezes it with all the strength he can muster. “Tell me what to do, Henry, and I will do it.”

A similar offer once made to Victor, deep at night when both boys should have been sleeping but Henry could not hold his tears and the anger behind him was burning his lungs. Long ago, Victor had held his hand and told him they would change the world. Now, Henry draws the flat of his thumb over Victor’s ragged knuckles and soothes their trembling.

“Trust me,” he says, lifting his gaze. “I want you to trust me.”

Bright eyes, red-rimmed and clear and exquisite. Frankenstein doesn’t blink as he seeks between Jekyll’s eyes, and he doesn’t look away. He seeks within him the meaning behind that word, one syllable and a thousand meanings. This boy never once left him, never once betrayed him. After school, for as long as their pens had ink for the other they wrote letters.

It was Victor who had stopped.

Victor who should be asking.

Yet here they are.

“Can you trust me?” Henry asks again.

Victor casts his gaze downward, discomfort in the subconscious twitch of muscles that pluck discordant from the itch beneath. “Do I have any other choice?”

“Of course you do. I will be unhappy that you will not let me help you, but I will not force what will not yield. I cannot stop your suffering, Victor, if you are determined to be undone by it. You are a brilliant man,” Henry says. “No chattering madman. And both of us have more to accomplish than engaging in a stalemate game of equal minds, each trying to play past the other.”

Victor makes a small sound, like the far-flung bastard cousin of a laugh. How strange it is to hear Henry speak so clearly now. When they were last friends, his frustrations were such - with school, with their peers, with his own existence - that he stammered terribly and the other boys thought him dumb. But even then, Frankenstein could hear past the noise and to the truth of his words. Brilliant. Powerful. Observant despite how severely fury clouded his judgment.

“It is a simple question,” Henry says after a moment’s silence, “but one with profound resonance. Can you trust me, Victor? Will you?”

Victor watches the tracing of Henry’s thumb across his knuckles, and pulling his lips between his teeth, nods.

Setting his other hand on top of theirs where they are joined, Henry allows a smile. “Then all will be well,” he promises. He regards his friend a moment more before releasing him, allowing Victor the freedom to let go on his own when he is ready. “You’ve not eaten.”

“I haven’t found my appetite.”

“I would have you find it,” Henry says, sitting back and slipping his fingers free when Victor finally lets them go. “I would have you sustain yourself on food, good food, not adrenaline and the needle.”

“Perhaps it will find me instead, once you’ve miraculously scraped back together all the broken bits of me,” Victor answers, his amusement thin but there, at least.

“Why wait?”

“I told you, Henry. I’ve no stomach for it.”

“It is impossible for you not to feel the pangs. And there is food before you, warm despite your dallying,” Henry says, his smile showing only in the fine creases beside his eyes and the muscles lifting just beneath. “Will you trust me when I tell you that you will sleep tonight, if you eat?”

Victor snorts.

“Will you?”

“You don’t worry about not keeping the promises you make me?” Victor asks him.

“If you sabotage yourself for no other reason than to prove me wrong then they will not be my promises failing, but your inability and lack of desire to follow instruction,” Henry points out, curling his fingers and resting his cheek against them. “You have seen my work, Victor, you have seen my patient’s victories against the most frightening of ailments. I ask only that you fill your stomach and rest your eyes.”

“That’s all?”

“To begin,” Jekyll’s lip quirks. “If you entrust yourself to my care -”

“You would take me as a patient?” Victor laughs, but he finds himself moving his plate near again as his friend speaks. “Would you house me in Bedlam?”

“I think your accommodations are quite fitting, we needn’t change those,” Jekyll laughs. “But it would benefit you greatly to allow me to take an active interest in your recovery.”

“God, it’s worse than I thought,” Victor mutters, before taking a grudging mouthful of peas. His nose wrinkles as if he’d never tasted them before, and Henry says nothing until the knot of them works down Victor’s throat. It’s more than that he seems to have never tasted them before. It’s as if the man has never eaten food before.

How admirable Victor Frankenstein is in his asceticism.

“It is more than you can see,” Henry allows. “In time and with my care, you will see it, and it will humble you. I will be here for you then, too, in whatever stead.”

“Most likely I’ll ask you to look away.”

“And so I will.”

Victor snorts again, but the sound is nearer to a laugh than it was before. Already there is a light, flickering weak, in his eyes that chases away the darkness in which he has bound himself. He spears a strip of beef and - hesitating first - brings it to his lips.

“What do you ask of me then?” Victor asks around it, taking up a napkin to press to his lips as he chews. “As your patient.”

“Trust, first and foremost,” Henry repeats. “As with all my patients. Though I would hope with you that obstacle would be easier to overcome than it is with most of them.”

Victor gives him a look, and has to look away before they both break composure. It is easier - suddenly, somehow - to breathe around each other again. To eat - and Victor continues to do so - and consider such a thing as entrusting himself to his friend’s medical and mental care. There is a relief to it.

“From that stems the rest of it,” Jekyll continues. “I would have you keep me informed on your habits and feelings regarding them. I would have you initially trust me to control your diet and intake of alcohol, if there is any.”

“Rarely,” Victor replies, rolling some potatoes across his tongue before swallowing.

“I would have you be open with me,” Henry adds. “Regarding everything. And I would have you obey my words and instructions when I give them, without argument.”

At this, Victor lifts his eyes again. He stretches his neck, head tilting to the side, as if there is a sudden constriction across his throat. His brow knits for a moment until he breathes again, and then it soothes.

“I am to entrust myself to you in everything, then,” he asks. “No half-measures.”

“Just so,” agrees Henry.

“And if it is against my nature to do something? If it is against my nature to make no argument - ”

“It is your nature that brought you to this low point, Victor. Perhaps this will be the new battle that you wage - to deny your tendency towards destruction, rather than denying your natural desire to live.”

“To live, but to live freely,” Victor says. “That is what you’re suggesting taking from me.”

“Only for a time, and in trusted hands it will be kept,” responds Henry, brow uplifted. “Have I ever been cruel to you? Have I ever been unkind?”

“Unkind, yes, but not to me. Only to those who have earned it.”

Henry inclines his head in thanks and acceptance alike, watching as Victor’s fork gathers upon it another helping of peas, their ranks disappearing rapidly now. He wonders if Victor has noticed how ravenously he eats, as if he were a man starved. He is starved, but such things are easily forgotten by men like Victor, who put all things before awareness of themselves.

“I feel as if I am being made a child again, expected to ask permission,” Victor says, a cessation in his consumption only to reach for his wine. He hesitates, fingers alighting against the glass as if it were hot, and lifts his eyes to Henry.

Victor watches him carefully, eyes unblinking and breath softly held. Victor doesn’t move, though he has not yet accepted the contract hanging between them in words alone. Henry keeps his eyes on his friend only a moment more before blinking and allowing him permission to enjoy his wine.

“Encouraged,” Jekyll amends for him softly. “Not expected. You asked not a moment ago, and found permission granted. I hardly seek to be a cruel schoolmaster. I just wish to save you from certain rituals and patterns in which you have entrenched yourself.”

Victor considers this, with his free hand rubbed across his throat, fingers held beneath the collar of his shirt. He takes another swallow of wine and sets the glass back to the table, slumping back in his chair and casting a sidelong glance to the dismal little window beside himself. Covered in soot, it shields only a view of the building stuffed too close beside his own.

He hadn’t thought of it before, that a thing meant for looking outward could be so limited, in layers and layers that prevent any hint of light’s penetration from beyond. No force of sun could pierce through brick and grime such as this, but still it shines during day, all the same, through clouds and filth and humanity’s hubris alike.

“I want my medicine,” Victor says, turning his attention back to his dark-eyed friend who watches him so serenely. “May I have it?”

“No,” comes the easy answer. There is not even a flicker of tension behind Jekyll’s eyes as he says it, not even a moment taken to consider. “Because you don't need it.”

“Perhaps I am in pain,” Victor suggests, and Henry just gently shakes his head.

“Of course you are in pain,” he tells him. “You are exhausted and hungry, you’ve not allowed yourself to listen to your body’s signals for a long time. You have dulled them to the point of no longer knowing from whence the pain comes or what it means, and whether it is pain that needs treatment or merely attention.”

Victor shakes his head, but a beat too soon, stops the movement. He draws his lips between his teeth and all at once, his body aches, pulse fluttering desperate as a moth’s wings too close to the fire. Before when he asked, it was an idle inquiry. Now, denied, it is an immolation from the inside out.

“You don’t know,” Victor says, before a curt breath snaps his words short. It unfurls slowly, as he brings the backs of his fingers to his lips and watches Henry from beneath his unwashed hair. “I will be sick. I will hurt. I won’t be able to do what you ask of me because it’s - it’s all I’ll think about. Please, Henry.”

“No.”

The word is like a whipcrack that sends Victor to his feet and nearly topples his chair. “And will you stop me then? From tearing my skin apart to feel heat beneath it again, from - from finding it when you aren’t here. Because I will. Whether I want to or not, whether you want me to or not, I will.”

“I know,” his friend replies, straightening his shoulders and setting his clasped hands to the table once more. “I know you will, because that is the nature of addiction. I have overcome my own. I work with those that need to, and they haven’t the mind, nor the heart to overcome as you do, Victor, I know you.”

“You don’t know this.”

“I know this,” Jekyll counters, and for a moment, just a brief thing, Victor feels a chill at hearing a voice pitched not quite as his friend’s should be. Rougher, cooler, slower, but when Henry speaks again he is himself once more.

“It is mind over matter, Victor. It is mind over body. You claim your body craves this but it doesn’t, it never has. Your mind, your incredible mind is what seeks this poison in your blood. Your mind seeks the prick of the needle that yields shivers just before that one coil of blood slips into the liquid in the glass. It craves that, more than the cool sensation of ease that follows, and you know this.”

Victor shakes his head, hands coming up to press against his eyes, then to the side, against his temples and pulse next. Henry sighs, reaching with palm upturned to the panicked man before him.

“You promised to trust me.”

“I cannot with this, I do not trust myself with this.”

“Look at your plate,” Jekyll says instead, directing Victor’s gaze there immediately. “Think on your initial apprehension at the very thought of food, and look at the result of allowing me to guide you. Of trusting me to know what is right for you.”

The satisfying weight that settled in his stomach now roils, upset not yet even by the need for morphine but for the wrenching terror of not being allowed it. Victor remains standing, fingers held against the edge of the table. Henry leaves his hand extended, palm open.

It is anathema to Victor, to allow someone else such control of him, and though his heart revolts at the thought with a clambering against his ribs, it is tired. Weak as the body that bears it slouching onward. Victor cannot trust himself to fight this - he has tried, and always lost. Perhaps that is the message inherent in what Henry asks of him now. Victor need not trust himself. He need not even think of himself. He need only trust Henry. Shut off for a time his own thoughts. Do nothing that is not expressly instructed. React rather than take action.

And the man that offers him so much care, as to offer to live Victor’s life for him while he repairs himself, isn’t just ‘someone else.’ He is Victor’s oldest friend. His dearest. His confidante and collaborator. His inspiration, in so many ways, from his remarkable mind to his ferocious heart.

He is someone who, in his strange and confusing youth, Victor once imagined that he loved as wholly as he now loves Lily.

Victor’s fingers flare and hover and close, then unfurl again as he falteringly sets his hand to Henry’s palm. His breath pulls short at the rough warmth of his palm. His fingertips press just a little, as if to ground himself - not with fists clenched or fingers folded, but to ground himself in Henry.

“I’ll be in Bedlam before the night’s through,” Victor mutters with morose amusement. “You’d do best to shackle me, really. Our monsters have a way of moving us whether we wish them to or not.”

“They certainly do,” Jekyll replies, folding his fingers against Victor’s hand. Neither say anything for a time, neither need to. Usually after a meal, they would discuss further work on taming Lily, on finding her and getting her to cooperate without Dorian standing in the way. Or, truthfully, Victor talked, and Henry listened. Once in awhile taking notes or sketching in his book things he does not show his friend.

Now, neither move to hasten the other to discussion, and after a moment more, Victor takes a seat again, drawing his free hand through his hair to tug it, leaving it a mess of tangled spikes after.

“Bathe,” Henry tells him. “Not merely to wash but to enjoy the water. Take your time in it, breathe in the steam.”

“I haven’t the time,” Victor laughs. “I have work, and -”

“Tonight you have the time,” Henry reminds him. “Bathe. And then go to bed.”

Victor sucks his bottom lip between his teeth and holds it there, letting his hand slip from his hair and run down his face, as if to wipe the tension from it. Henry promised that if he ate, he would sleep. Victor knows that food can have a sedative effect, and has little doubt that his body will put its remaining energies to digestion. But a cursory glance to the small box atop his dresser betrays him.

“Will you stay tonight? Are you going to, I mean, or are you returning home?”

“Shall I sleep on the operating table?” Henry asks him, smiling a little as Victor snorts. “I will stay as long as I can. I have reports to compile and patient files to read over. Once I am contented that you will rest, I shall make my leave.”

“And what am I meant to do, then,” Victor asks, aware of how petulant he sounds. He lifts a hand in apology. “If I wake in the middle of the night, and you’re not here.”

Henry’s laugh is no more than a sigh pushed a little faster than usual. “What you normally do when I am not here, as I have not been for many years.”

“You’ve forbidden me from that,” Victor reminds him, wry.

“Bathe. Sleep. When you are still, I will go. And tomorrow you will tell me the truth, as to whether you gave way to the needle or not.” Henry pauses, a shrug lifting up one shoulder. “Or I can take it with me.”

“No,” Victor whispers, eyes wide. “No. At least - at least let me know it’s here. That I could have it, but choose not to. It’s worse to think I could not have it at all.”

“As you wish,” his friend says, sitting back to regard Victor before him. He ducks his chin and lifts his eyes and waits a moment before repeating - for the last time - “Bathe.”

He watches Victor laugh again, nervous and breathy, before moving to obey, shutting the door to his little bathroom with a click. Henry does not stand to seek out the box in which Victor keeps his vice. He does not walk the room to remove objects that could present potential dangers to Victor’s health and well being. He trusts him, to a point, to not do himself more harm than he already has.

He had, in fact, listened to the last command Henry had inadvertently given him, in a letter, before Victor had stopped replying: change the world, and you will change with it.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“But eating is - it’s easy, isn’t it? Sleeping. These are base things, animal needs,” he says. “Of course our brains are wired to perform them, even though my connections crossed. But everything else must have atrophied to the point that even those base things proved impossible. What of higher functions? Thinking clearly. Focusing. Regaining strength in body and mind, Henry,” he laughs, turning the backs of his fingers against his cheek and shaking his head as he looks over the papers still spread along the table. “Even my words, clarity of speech, has gone from me with no one to talk to for so long.”_
> 
> _“I’m here,” Jekyll reminds him, stepping closer still so that he can settle back against the desk, arms crossed and legs stretched before him. “And I assure you, you are hardly a raving madman.”_

It’s either a credit to Victor’s fortitude, or a symptom of his sicknesses, that the sound of screaming can become a gentle din akin to the rush of waves against the shore. They move much the same way, swelling in a crash that carries from one end of Bedlam to the other before fading for a time. And then, like clockwork, a howl starts the process again, carrying between men who moan like beasts from their cages.

And yet, amidst insanity, it is still the most lucid that Victor has felt in days. Weeks. Months, if he’s being honest. The first three days were a vomitous, hellish agony as the poppy left his system. Interspersed with food and clean water, new linens laid in his bed when he sweated or was sick into the old ones, baths drawn for his shuddering body and kept warm with kettles from the stove.

He recalls apologizing, as frequently as he heaved with illness or pain. For taking Jekyll’s time. For letting himself become this. For not writing, as he knows he should have.

For not writing, as often as he wanted to, but could not bring himself to prolong what felt like an inevitable end, back when he accepted that ends could be permanent.

This last, he managed to swallow down before allowing loose.

He still itches for it. Still wants it, as direly as he wants anything else in the world barring Lily. He took immediate note of the syringes in Henry’s laboratory, of the medicine cabinet and its likely contents. But work has - for now - quieted his craving, at least for long enough to attempt furtherance.

“I keep coming back to the fact that none of them remember their lives before that moment,” Victor murmurs, his patient notes spread before him. “They remember the ordinary parts, families and childhood stories, but when madness sets in, it’s as if they become another person entirely. A trick of the mind, do you think? To protect what lingers of their sanity, like white blood cells surrounding a wound.”

“It’s possible,” Henry replies. “When they become the monsters you see, their minds and bodies revert to primal mechanisms. The hindbrain and nothing more. They know only to feed, to kill, to fuck.” He stretches his neck and tosses a pencil to the table filled with beakers before him. “They haven’t the higher functions their counterparts have. I don’t know if there is a way to access that, or if any memories are stored within to retrieve.”

“They could well be,” Victor murmurs. “Hypnosis goes deep enough to implant information, perhaps it will go far enough to recover it also.”

“Unfortunately that is out of my expertise,” Henry laughs. “And jurisdiction. Unless you know of someone?”

“I might,” Victor answers, surprised by the sound of his words. There is hope in them. There is something like optimism. He turns his attention back to the puzzle of papers before him, momentarily abashed. “I’ll ask around, if anyone will still talk to me, that is.”

“Surely you still have acquaintances within our field. They’ll be more likely to speak with you than with me,” Henry reminds him, wry, and Victor huffs a sound like a laugh.

“You say that, but the only thing I’m worse at than making friends is keeping them,” he snorts.

An amused sound from the other end of the room before Henry Jekyll’s footsteps echo across it as he comes nearer. “It is always the loss of those who do not stay, than the one for whom they do not stay,” he says. “Our contemporaries have always had a skewed view of the world, and the genius within it.”

His hand sets to Victor’s shoulder and holds there as he looks over the notes as well. “Evolution has a tendency to destroy those of weaker minds by their own folly, and for humanity’s greater good. Perhaps,” he adds, hand slipping to press warm to Victor’s neck next, just against his pulse. “Such monstrosity is a rebellion against its own end. Perhaps once we discover what it is that prevents the sanity from keeping its clinging hold on our patients we will find the meaning and purpose of our survival.”

Victor follows Henry’s thoughts as best he can, with the warmth of his hand an eminent distraction to ideas already dense with complexity, even in the theoretical. Their work requires focus that Victor can only now begin to attain. Henry’s hand undoes him with no more than a touch.

How weak he is after all.

“You’re suggesting that rather than approaching madness as a defense mechanism of a damaged mind,” Victor asks, “we instead attempt to study it as evolutionary advantage. A strength, rather than a failure, but one that requires time and practice to control before its consumption is entire.”

“I am,” Henry confirms, letting his fingers peel one by one from Victor’s skin. “Perhaps because no one ever has before, and scientifically something cannot be so common without an explanation.”

He continues around the desk and towards the chair that now stands empty, its straps hanging silent in the dusty light from the window. His posture is meditative, quiet. Eyes skim over the familiar bonds and rough wood, the nail marks against the arms of it and divots dug into the front legs by restless heels.

“My work has been missing a vital element until this moment,” Jekyll muses. “It has been stagnant as water in a swamp. I am glad to have you here.”

Victor takes him in a moment more - the cascade of inky hair across his shoulders, so black it’s nearly blue, and the way the gas lamps shine copper from his skin. He ducks his head then, hiding the smile that comes unbidden, and with a sigh that relents the work’s victory over them for now, Victor settles to the stool behind him. Hands folded between his knees, his shoulders slump. He lifts his chin and lets his head loll back, eyes closing.

“Stagnant you might think them,” he says towards the ceiling, “but if you’ll pardon my language, they are bloody deep. I’m glad to be of assistance, rather than at the fore. I wish I could be more useful to you, but I find I tire rather quickly.”

Jekyll turns to look at him then, body language open and relaxed, breathing steady. There is still sweat upon his brow on days he misses the needle, there are cruel bruises up his arms from days past when he had given in and let the morphine win.

He has not since allowing Jekyll to care for him.

He has not, Henry hopes, because he has not allowed him to.

“You are recovering,” he says softly, hands behind his back as he continues to watch his friend. “It is encouraging. And your cooperation with my methods is appreciated. I am proud of your progress.”

Victor rubs his knuckles against his cheek, as if to scrub away the unfamiliar warmth that heats it. After a moment, when he cannot force his blush to relent, he lets his hand fall back to his lap and breathes a laugh, soft. “Is it that?”

“Progress?”

“Yes.”

“Did you sleep last night?” Jekyll asks him, and Victor nods, once.

“Uneasily, but yes.”

“And did you eat before, and bathe?” Again, Frankenstein nods. “There you are,” Henry answers. “How long has it been since you have done those things - all of them - for longer than a day at a time?”

“Months,” Victor confesses. “Years, possibly.”

“Is that not progress?”

“It feels as if it’s - as if I’m treading water,” Victor responds, after a moment of thought. “Keeping my head above, but otherwise unmoving.”

Henry hums, as he lowers his head and comes closer still with steady steps, to stand before him with only the table between. “Better than drowning, my friend.”

Victor watches Henry’s smile appear, unfurling slowly as a palm frond and just as expansive. He shivers a little, bringing up his hands to hook them over his shoulders, palms pressed to his bracers as if he might stop his body from its undesired shiverings and flutterings and all that nonsense. He hasn’t the energy for it. They haven’t the time. What once may have been can be no longer, Victor tells himself. Entropy ends all things.

“What do we do now?” Victor asks. “Not the work. Me. Are we finished? If the intent was only to have me eat better and sleep more, then -”

“The intent was to have you as yourself again,” Jekyll counters softly. “Your brilliant mind allowed to flourish, not merely repeat motions to keep you alive. Food and rest are merely the beginning.” He sets the fingers of one hand to the table in a steeple and draws them across the surface as he steps around the desk and nearer his friend.

“You must understand, Victor, that I will not leave you in the midst of his fog you’ve gathered around yourself. I am not like others you have drawn near, only to have them leave. Unless...” Henry’s fingers release the wood and fold against the inside of his elbow. “You wish me to stop. And you want us finished.”

“Finished,” Victor echoes, attention lingering a moment too long on Henry’s hand when it tucks against his arm. He can feel it still, where it rested on the back of his neck, beneath the collar of his shirt and pressed softly to his pulse.

Was he taking his pulse?

“Finished,” Henry repeats. “I do not attend to those who do not want me. I will not remain in the presence of those who wish me gone. If we are to end this, it will be an end, Victor.”

Before he can counter or consider, Frankenstein shakes his head, lifting his gaze to meet Henry’s own. “I don’t - I don’t want you to stop. I don’t want us to be finished, Henry, not again. There’s so much to be done.”

The smile that greets the answer warms Victor from his toes to his eyes, pleasant and welcome. For a moment his friend says nothing at all, and the anticipation of hanging in that silence speeds Victor’s heart.

“Has it become easier to trust in me?” Is all he asks when he speaks again. “When you see that nothing I do causes your pain?”

“I knew you wouldn’t.”

“You could not have known that until you experienced it.”

“You’ve never hurt me,” Victor says, pressing his teeth to his bottom lip for a moment before finally answering Henry’s question. “Yes. It has. I trust you, but -”

“But, Victor?”

“But eating is - it’s easy, isn’t it? Sleeping. These are base things, animal needs,” he says. “Of course our brains are wired to perform them, even though my connections crossed. But everything else must have atrophied to the point that even those base things proved impossible. What of higher functions? Thinking clearly. Focusing. Regaining strength in body and mind, Henry,” he laughs, turning the backs of his fingers against his cheek and shaking his head as he looks over the papers still spread along the table. “Even my words, clarity of speech, has gone from me with no one to talk to for so long.”

“I’m here,” Jekyll reminds him, stepping closer still so that he can settle back against the desk, arms crossed and legs stretched before him. “And I assure you, you are hardly a raving madman.”

Victor laughs, enough that it’s genuinely warm, before just regarding his friend, waiting for further answers. Surely there is nothing to be done with something so complex as mental agility. Surely there is nothing to be done in regards to Victor’s lack of friends to speak to, and people to converse with in his field. Surely there is little more his friend can do than just be there.

As he is.

As he promised to be.

As he had been, showing up years after Victor’s last letter because Victor asked him to come.

“I will have you whole again,” Henry promises. “I will have you lecturing me at ungodly hours of the night on a new discovery that has graced your mind. I will have you,” he sighs, setting his hands behind himself, “be well, if you listen and obey, as you have done so admirably so far.”

The praise and promises alike sit well on Victor, darkening his cheeks further even as he laughs and tries to hide it, head turned aside and arm across his eyes. He slumps, then, comfortable as a cat basking in the sun, and just as drowsy with the exhaustion that these mental rigors bring upon him when he is still so newly recovering from himself. Face pressed to the inside of his elbow, elbow propped against the table, Victor sighs into the darkness of his own arm and succumbs to this.

Yes, he trusts him.

Yes, he knows that Henry will do no harm.

“Give me something to work on,” Victor asks, voice muffled against the table. “Not… work-work. Something to improve. For you.”

Henry makes a sound, pleased and warm, and slips one leg back to rest his toe against the floor. He knows Victor watches it where it crosses his periphery. He knows he’s paying attention, his back is tense with it. Henry allows one hand to unfold and hover palm down over it, tracing in a slow draw down Victor’s spine and back up, never once touching him.

“Sit up, please,” he says, folding his hand away as Victor does, as though he never moved it at all. “Your shoulders back and spine straight. Keep your breathing even, let the oxygen flow to your brain properly.”

Victor gives him a look and Henry returns it, grin wry and eyes narrowed. Then he pushes himself from the desk and moves around behind his friend, just standing there as he slowly works his shoulders from their slouch, and his back from the curve he keeps it in.

“I want you to write me a letter,” Jekyll tells him.

It is a strain to sit so straight, hands brought to the table before him and back rigid despite his inclinations to hunch over any desk set before him. But the effort seems suddenly less important, in comparison to the curiosity that now rivets Victor in an entirely different way. He leans back, a little, drawn to the warmth he imagines standing so close behind him.

“A letter?” Victor asks, brow creasing when that warmth does not find him. “About what?”

“Your progress, perhaps,” Henry says, turning his hands together behind his back. “Doubts and worries regarding your therapy.”

“I could tell you.”

“But you shan’t,” Jekyll laughs softly, freeing one hand to rest just above Victor’s shoulder again, not touching yet. “Because I told you to write a letter. Our words come to us more freely when we have time to consider them on a page. We find ourselves saying things we may not have, when tact held our tongue.”

“You want me to be tactless,” Victor asks, head turning just a little, just enough to see how near Henry’s hand has come to him. His chest moves with a fullness of breath that Victor neither permits nor desires, but is there all the same.

“I want you to be honest,” answers Henry, his accent a luxurious purr curled warm against his words.

There have been letters. Many of them, and some so tactless that Victor saw them burned rather than risk that they would be seen by their intended Henry or anyone else. He allows for now the comfortable lie that he stopped writing Henry entirely during their years estranged. It could not be further from the truth. He wrote to him, in need and want and during desperate hours, but never could he bear to offer his heart up shuddering, ripped loose of its moorings to one who never saw Victor’s hand already perched in wait above his chest.

“When?” Victor asks, lips thinned and pinned between his teeth.

“Honest?” Henry laughs. “Always. The letter? Take all the time you need to write it. My one condition is you do not tear up pages. You may correct mistakes with a line through them, but nothing more.” Finally, he sets his hand against Victor’s shoulder again, his thumb against the back of his neck where he strokes through the warm curls of Victor’s hair. “I need your mind, Victor, to see what I am healing.”

Beneath the gentle weight of his hand, Victor’s shoulders slump again - this time not in resignation nor exhaustion, but in a relief that ripples goosebumps down his arms. Victor all but moans at the contact. And then he runs a hand across the opposite arm to rub away the sensation, and straightens again quickly, clearing his throat. Shoulders spread, spine stiff, ribs open.

Another stroke of Henry’s thumb across his hair nearly crumbles him again.

“A letter then,” Victor agrees, once steadied. “On whatever subject I choose. No torn pages, but only crossed-out -”

“A single line.”

“But only a single line through my mistakes,” Victor says.

“Through what you see as mistakes,” Henry amends, but he strokes against his skin in praise for understanding and being willing to obey. “Should there be a spelling error, I will mark it. Grammar, I will mark it. This is not a lesson but a visualization of the parts of your mind that you feel need work and I know need care.” He steps nearer and reaches past Victor to take up a clean piece of paper to lay atop the mess of the others.

“Write to me of yourself as you once did,” he murmurs, “knowing the words would be read and returned.”

“Will you write me a letter in reply, then?”

“Perhaps I will,” Henry smiles. “Or we could talk of my replies, as we read yours.”

When Jekyll lets him go, he can feel the way Victor takes effort to hold himself still and not follow. “Should you feel tired as you work, you may ask to stop. I’ve no intention of driving you to agony with the strokes of your pen.”

“You want me to write to you here?” Victor asks, watching Henry wide-eyed as he circles the table and steps away. “Right now?”

“Is there a better time?”

“When I’m at home, settled in, able to think and -”

“Reach for the needle to ease your words from you.”

Victor’s narrow look, and the thinning of his lips, says everything. And so does he, confessing his thoughts in a single word: “Yes.”

“Then I think here is exactly the place to begin,” Jekyll replies, impassive, but pleased enough that Victor admits to him his ill-intentions. “Think of it as learning to focus, in the environment where it will be most required of you.”

“And if I exhaust myself…” Victor begins, but he quiets himself immediately and reaches for the pencil nearby. Henry already told him what to do if he is tired or needs a break. Henry doesn’t need to repeat himself again.

Soon, the room is filled with the scratching of Victor’s pencil and the slow deliberate flicks of Henry’s pen as he takes inventory of his lab. Neither interrupt the other, neither disturb the other. It is as though they aren’t there at all, but in phantom thought form as when they wrote letters to each other as young men.

Henry does not question Victor’s need to relax his posture and rest upon the desk and doesn’t deny any of his requests to do so. He suggests that the letter be set aside while he rests, so that Victor doesn’t decide to remove some pertinent thoughts.

By evening time both are tired. As Victor gathers his notes and the letter atop, so Henry takes with him his medical bag and some vials from the laboratory. With a hand to the base of Victor’s back, the doctor leads him to the door.

They leave Bedlam together, no words exchanged but smiles instead, that speak volumes on their own.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“I am in control of you,” Henry whispers, tone just the same. “I am in control of you, because you have given that control to me. You have trusted me to know what is best for you, to dig you free of the grip this thing has on you. I thought I could trust you to listen.”_
> 
> _Victor’s arm is released, though the pressure against his back is not. He doesn’t need to turn to see how close Henry is to him. He doesn’t need to turn to know that he is watching him, eyes hooded and lips pursed together in disappointment._
> 
> _That stings crueler than any lash. Disappointment._
> 
> _He would rather anger._

~~Dr. Jekyll,~~

Henry,

How strange it is to see you ~~here~~ there ~~so near~~ at your station, a crease in your brow and a beaker in hand. I have yet to come to terms with your return in any reasonable way, or in any way at all, were I to be as honest as you’ve asked. Do you know that when I ~~wrote~~ sent word to you at long last, I expected nothing? It was a desperate endeavor, and I am convinced that had my missive been lost, or delayed, or ignored (as you had every moral right) that I would not be here now, and my life work would be at an end. 

How fortunate I am that you are a better friend than I.

And though my nature is an abysmally melancholic one, prone to fits of stubbornness with which you will increasingly become re-familiarized, I am ~~happy to have you here grateful to~~ relieved to be in your care. To have stripped away the ceaseless clamoring noise and know that in those moments I need do no more - think no more - than of what you have asked of me. Our monsters consume us, devouring every thought and every moment and every breath. You have given me the brief reprieve from them that in my drive I could not give myself.

I trust you are familiar with these feelings. I know you are. ~~We are so much~~

There are truths in the world, poetic and scientific. Now and then they overlap, and I see in us an instance of this. Energy can be neither created nor destroyed, but can only change form. Is that what has happened to us? When we were young, I kept it and shared it with you, but found myself possessed of a righteous fury to do for you what you could not do for yourself. In recent years, as you have attained glories in your work that once seemed impossible, my own energy has faltered. You now return it to me as I once did for you.

Is there enough between us to support us both? From where will we source more energy needed to keep us both aflame? Will we forever trade our roles, that while one burns luminous the other simmers to embers and ash?

This is what ~~I fear~~ worries me now. I would entrust that energy to you entirely, you who is so capable with it, rather than reclaim it at all and prove myself once more unable to harness it properly. Do not share it with me at cost to yourself. Do not. In this, take instruction from me, rather than I from you. Better to be an assistant to greatness than to waste potential.

How much more smoothly the words come now. ~~as when I wrote to you in lieu of~~ There were letters. Many of them, written and forgotten, written and destroyed. Letters that now I am relieved I did not send, though I wish I might have hastened our reunion with words other than those that I burnt. I did not know how, and the things I might have said then carried with them the risk certainty of imposing myself upon you in a way that ~~might have been unwelc~~ would have changed the nature of our friendship perhaps irreparably.

This is why my first letters upon the page are lined through. It is easier this way, to speak to you not as doctor, though it is a well - and hard - earned title, and neither with the burden of your Christian name, but as Henry, my friend.

My friend, who has begun to turn over the fallow earth of my heart so that it might not struggle with such difficulty to support life. My friend, who helps me find the insidious weeds that run winding, their roots sunk deep. ~~My friend, who has always been~~

I owe you a gratitude, Henry. I owe you my life.

 ~~Yours~~ Your friend, always,  
Victor

\---

Victor has always been an early riser, where Henry has not. But he wakes nonetheless when he hears the man shuffling around the lab, trying to remain quiet and unobtrusive.

Some nights their research has led them to deep discussions late into the night. Discussions that ended with a gentle argument regarding Henry taking a carriage home at so late an hour, and how he should stay instead. So he had, several times, and this among them, and every time Victor had woken first and moved around his lab before leaving it entirely for the apartment beyond.

Only then does Henry push himself to stretch, hands set to the table and back curved in an arch as his bones click and align back to support the posture he keeps. Then he settles again, and regards the laboratory at an angle. This is very much like the place they had spoken of as boys, cooped up in their room at night under lock and key; large with high ceilings, windows above the grit of the city beyond, equipment and electricity and easy access to water.

Despite the mess, it is a perfect environment for work.

Henry gives Victor a few moments more of solitude before rising and following his path up the stairs and through the hidden door into his apartment.

How Victor managed it so quickly is admittedly something of a marvel. Henry imagines he had it prepared already, from some earlier time, and familiar with the motions required to intoxicate himself, readily found one of his veins not yet collapsed and dispensed. His back is to Henry, but Henry can see the tension gone from his shoulders, the ease of his movements as he slips his hands skillfully from his box to the dresser drawer, as if that were his activity rather than returning his morphine to its altar atop.

“Was just going to have a bath,” Victor remarks, turning only enough to see Henry in his peripheral. “If you wouldn’t mind putting on tea, I’ll be down shortly.”

“You bathed last night, Victor.”

“Am I allowed only one?” He asks, with a faint laugh.

“Yes,” Jekyll replies, stepping nearer on light feet and watching Victor raise his shoulders against the hands that rest softly against them. It is not a strike, it needn’t be. Both Henry and Victor had endured their share of beatings and cruelties at school, both have learned to take that pain as nothing more than temporary. Both had a bad habit of never learning from it.

“Unless you can explain why you need another,” he adds, leaning nearer and letting his hands slip to the tops of Victor’s arms to hold him that way instead. “Are you unwell?”

“I feel fine.”

“Have you filthied yourself in your sleep?”

Victor laughs, a nervous and soft thing, and shakes his head. “I’m in control of myself.”

“Are you?”

“I merely want another bath before we return to work,” Victor says. When his arm muscles tense - not even enough to be called a proper movement - Henry’s hands twitch in response. Victor’s throat works in a swallow, brow raised as he keeps his head down just a little, eyes forward.

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“At the moment, no, I am not in control of myself - you are in control of me, Henry. I should think you would appreciate my attempts at maintaining hygiene, especially going back to that place.”

“I appreciate that greatly,” Jekyll replies, tone low, voice soft. He keeps one hand gripped against Victor’s arm as the other slips lower, to the sensitive soft skin of the inner elbow. “I appreciate the work and the care you take with patients who needn’t be yours. What I do not appreciate…” Henry’s thumb seeks cruelly against the muscle as he presses to the fresh mark left there by the needle, covered quickly by a sleeve. “Is dishonesty.”

Victor’s knees buckle as he yelps, the sound snapped short to a hiss through bared teeth as Henry does not let him twist away, but instead pins him to the dresser.

“I didn’t lie,” Victor whispers, wrenching his arm as he tries to free himself from the firm finger planted hard against the leaking wound, blooming bruised before Henry even touched it. “I didn’t lie to you, Henry. I chose to do this. I am in control of myself.”

“I am in control of you,” Henry whispers, tone just the same. “I am in control of you, because you have given that control to me. You have trusted me to know what is best for you, to dig you free of the grip this thing has on you. I thought I could trust you to listen.”

Victor’s arm is released, though the pressure against his back is not. He doesn’t need to turn to see how close Henry is to him. He doesn’t need to turn to know that he is watching him, eyes hooded and lips pursed together in disappointment.

That stings crueler than any lash. Disappointment.

He would rather anger.

“I suppose you always have been in control of yourself, haven’t you,” Henry murmurs after a moment. “No need for such things as aid or care.”

It is only the soothing warmth of the renewed blood in his veins that keeps Victor as steady as he is. The weight of his guilt would see all his veins fallen, otherwise, toppling like collapsing buildings to the center of his chest, and laying waste to his heart. But it beats now slowly, strongly. Victor shakes his head, then nods, then merely bows his head forward, chin against his chest and tongue held for a moment between his lips.

“Haven’t we both?” Victor asks. “Learned to live for ourselves, when no one else would live for us. Years I have been alone, Henry. Years I have somehow dragged myself from bed, most days, and lived with only my own company to push me. This was no different than when I make myself sleep, or eat, or take a piss. I chose this, Henry, just now. You must believe me.”

“I believe you, Victor,” his friend tells him, turning his nose against his cheek with a gentle brush. “I believe you’ve made the choice you feel most confident in. I believe you’ve found your tactful nature unable to tell me to go when you clearly want me gone.”

“I don’t -”

“I do not stay where I am unwanted,” Henry hisses. “I do not help those who can help themselves. I am done groveling for my place in this world, Victor, and I shall not do it for a place in your life.”

Jekyll’s hands release Victor so quickly he has to catch his balance against the dresser. He braces for an instant, long enough to choke down air and try to clear his thoughts enough to move, to turn, to follow Henry back down the stairs in a clatter of feet and to hurtle himself around the table and upset a beaker to the floor and to pin himself to the door before Henry can reach it. His heart is beating so hard as he stands before him, he wonders if Jekyll can see it straining against the stays of his ribs. Victor blinks slowly to reorient himself, just upstairs, now down, and Henry’s gaze so sharp and soft all at once that Victor trains his eyes to the floor instead.

“You have a place in my life,” Victor pleads with him. His shirtsleeve sticks to the blood darkening the inside of his arm as he lifts his hand to his nose, the dark spot spread out the width of Henry’s thumb. “You have, Henry. You have always.”

“I have been replaced.”

“No.”

“You have put the needle before me.”

“No,” Victor begs, cuff against his mouth and heat burgeoning unwelcome in his eyes. “No, Henry -”

“Then what? What has turned you away from our work together? What has turned you away from me?”

Victor clenches his fingers to a fist to stop their shaking. He wants to sleep. He wants to finally rest, now that the itching of insect wings in his blood has been soothed and the horsefly sting in his skin has been given balm. He wants to lay with Henry and let him rail against Victor’s chest as he did when they were boys.

It was against bullies, then. Awful creatures who took no greater pleasure than in causing torment.

It would be against Victor now, who has - in this moment - done just the same.

Victor lowers his hand, but does not remove his body from the door, slumping heavily against it. “I dreamed of her,” he whispers, uncaring as his eyes spill over and his breath jogs sharply from his lungs. “I dreamed of her, and when I woke, it was the only solace I could grasp that would outwarm the memory of her kiss.”

For a moment, Henry stands unmoving, tense and tall and proud before his friend. Then, motion by motion, breath by breath, he eases to something softer, to someone more familiar. When he steps near to set a palm against Victor’s cheek, the doctor nearly collapses against him.

“You always created such monsters,” Jekyll breathes. “Even in our time together at school you would make monsters of the boys, who had never before then looked at you wrongly. For my sake, for your own.” He wraps his other arm around Victor’s shoulders and holds him near as he trembles, silent and in pain, against him.

“And you created her,” he adds. “Her that haunts your mind and takes your soul from you breath by breath. It is her who drives you to the needle, who makes it so tempting. Her that has that control, not you, Victor. Not you and not I.”

Victor brings an unsteady hand to Henry’s chest, fingers curling hard in his lapels. A silent sob wracks his shoulders roughly, and as he shakes his head, he comes to rest his cheek against Henry’s shoulder. He remembers his words, in the letter he wrote - that they seem to have traded places. It is not Henry now that needs to rail and lash out and draw close and keen.

It is Victor who needs those things now.

“I want her gone,” Victor sighs, shaking. “I want her - I want her returned to herself, or destroyed. I want her out of my head because I either have her or she’s dead. Henry, I can’t live like this. It is purgatory.”

“One can leave purgatory,” Henry promises him. “One must. Heaven or Hell but they must.” He leans back, cupping Victor’s face with his hands and watches him close. “We have been in Hell, brother, we have seen it and we know it well. What we know cannot scare us. We will overcome this, we will have her gone. Together, only together. Trust me to do this with you.”

The contact nearly undoes him. It has been longer than Victor can measure since he was touched without secret malice beneath the other’s skin. It has been longer still since he was touched by warm hands, living hands, whole and human and pure of heart. Were it not for Henry’s ardent strength, Victor would waver to the faint that already threatens him, thick as ichor in his veins. Instead he lifts a shaking hand to one of Henry’s own, and holds it firm, holds it fast, turning his cheek against it.

He nods then, eyes closing, quickly bringing up his other hand to wipe away the snot from his nose and sigh, shuddering.

“Can you forgive me,” Victor asks, his whisper spilling warmth against Henry’s hand. “And - and if not, then you are best to go and leave me to this. In my letter, I asked -”

“Hush.” That, only that. “I will not leave you with a noose around your neck, I cannot.” A rough thumb strokes beneath Victor’s eye to wipe dry the tears there, the other just as smooth against his lips to draw them open. “Breathe.”

The silence hums around them, electric, and neither move from the other. Victor’s breath pants hot and damp against Henry’s hand as light eyes meet dark and hold there, obedient once more. Jekyll’s eyes hood but do not close, his pulse eases but does not slow, and moment after moment they share this space together.

Only when Victor’s breathing hitches does Henry let him go, soothing a palm against his neck, thumb resting gently in the divot between his collarbones.

“You’re dreaming again,” he says softly. “You’re regaining the nutrients for that in your blood. I’m only sorry this success plagues you this way.”

Victor softens with each passing heartbeat that Henry’s hand rests against his chest. A weak smile permeates the murky fog of him and Victor shakes his head a little when he feels it appear, as if it were a moth to be swept away from his sleeve. “Don’t tell me that,” Victor murmurs. “I’d rather starve sleepless than consider dreams of her a success.”

“Give it time,” Jekyll tells him. “Even with today’s mistake - it was that, wasn’t it?”

Victor nods, not only obedient, but in earnest.

“Even with today’s mistake, you have come so far, Victor. There is color in your cheeks again, and warmth in your body. You slept the entire night through, not stirring once.”

“Haunted by nightmares.”

“But resting, physically, even though your thoughts were troubled. The body must mend before the mind. You know this.”

“I know,” Victor agrees. He lifts a hand to Henry’s own, pressing against his fingers as if to trap the heat of his touch against Victor’s skin. “I should have - I should have told you, what I wanted to do. You would have stopped me. Redirected.”

“I would have told you not to.”

“Yes.”

“Because you needn’t have it.”

“Yes.”

“Because you are better than that, Victor,” Henry tells him, adding a little pressure to his hand as he speaks, for emphasis. “You are stronger than that.”

“So you say,” Victor sighs, correcting himself when Henry no more than tilts his head. “I believe you,” he says instead. “Even if -”

“Even if?”

“I don’t believe it of myself,” says Victor. “I believe that you believe it of me.”

“I do believe it,” Henry assures him. “I know it.” He holds his palm against Victor’s chest a moment more, before taking half a step back and keeping just his fingers pressed there, Victor’s on top to keep contact. “I can prove it to you. In fact, I can have you prove it to yourself.”

Frankenstein blinks. “How?”

Henry smiles. “Come with me.”

He steps away, knowing full well that Victor will follow at his heels. He returns to the apartment proper, to the dresser against which he had held his friend, to the box on top of it. He waits for Victor to come closer, to stand beside him.

“Open that for me,” he says, waiting for the doctor to reach and work open the clasp. Within is rubber tubing, a needle, a bottle, a cloth. Victor makes a sound as he reveals this to Henry beside him. There is a filth to it he himself has a distaste for. Baring it so is frightening.

“I want you to break the bottle,” Jekyll says to him. “And the needle. By your hand, you will get rid of this, because you’ve the strength for it.”

_Because I told you to._

Victor’s hands begin to tremble, enough that he takes them away from the box, but returns them to the edge of his dresser. He makes a small sound, plaintive, and shakes his head. “I can’t -”

“You can. You don’t want to, but you can.”

“I’m not in my right mind, Henry. My thoughts are clouded, I’m not thinking clearly.”

“Are you not? Then everything you’ve just said to me was not what you meant to say?”

Another little noise rips itself quietly from Victor, like a child being menaced with a switch. He jams the back of his hand against his nose again, catching his breath against his fingertips. It was the knowledge that it was here for him that has kept him from complete collapse during his worst days. The awareness that, were things to become even worse, he could still correct them. He could still treat himself.

The thought of being without that safety net, without a method of escape at all, is more terrifying than Bedlam, than being without Lily, than losing Henry again. It rattles Victor to his core and he pins his lips between his teeth to prevent an outright plea that would as soon bring him to his knees as tear his throat asunder with its desperation. He shakes his head, then, in response to himself and in response to Henry.

“But if I need it,” he whispers, when he can speak again. “If I can’t - if I have to -”

“You will not need it,” Jekyll tells him, voice calm, tone cool as it had been when he stood by the door prepared to leave. “You will not, because you will overcome it.”

“I c-” Victor swallows, panic clouding his vision as he looks to his salvation in the box, open for Henry to dissect and judge, dismiss as nothing at all when it is everything, surely it is everything. “I can’t do that alone.”

“You shall not be alone,” Henry reminds him. “We will be together. We will work and discover together, we will destroy your monsters together. We will overcome your addiction together.”

Victor shakes his head again before reaching for the box. His fingers are pale against it, and with a shuddered breath he turns it to Henry, offering him the contents to destroy. The doctor keeps his hands behind his back, he does not move to take it.

“I asked you to destroy it.”

“I can’t.”

“I told you that you must.”

“I cannot, Henry!”

“Trust me.” Jekyll’s hand settles quick beneath Victor’s chin to hold it upraised, to keep his eyes from slipping to the needle and bottle and tubing within the box again. “Trust me to know that you can. Trust me in my decisions, I make them for you, with only your wellbeing in mind.” He leans nearer, pressing his forehead against Victor’s, closing his eyes so that Victor closes his own. “You will break it,” he repeats. “You will do it now. For yourself, and for me, Victor, _now_.”

He can get more needles, Victor tells himself. He can get another syringe. He can get morphine. He is a doctor, he has access to them, he can get more if he needs them, but he doesn’t want to.

He doesn’t want to have to wake up aching.

He doesn’t want to have to hunt and fret and check to ensure that he has enough not only for the moment, but for two after that.

He doesn’t want it anymore.

And with a sob, as inside him his own monsters begin a litany of where he can replace the precious contents that slip from his fingers, Victor lets the box drop to the floor, choking back a gasp as glass shatters around their feet.

Jekyll moves too quickly to register. A jarring motion when pressed already so near to Victor, that he hasn’t a moment to protest before warm lips are against his own. And that, in itself, is so startling he loses his breath entirely.

There is possession in that kiss. There is forgiveness and pride. There is something warmer still and far more intoxicating that has Victor trembling just thinking of it. This is not the cautious brush of lips from one boy to the other as one slept, curled together in a tiny cot in winter, trying to stay warm. This is not the poetry Victor feeds to his soul. This is something feral. This is something wild. This is otherworldly.

When it breaks, both gasp in a breath, and Victor finally opens his eyes, seeking for Henry’s.

“You did it,” the other breathes, voice rough. “The first shackle is broken, and the rest we can break together.”


End file.
